<![CDATA[Flood education in Indonesian secondary geography is often descriptive, leaving students few opportunities to reason about why floods occur in particular places and affect some communities more than others. This study examined whether Geographical Inquiry-Project Based Learning (GI-PjBL), which embeds the five geo-inquiry stages (ask, acquire, visualize, storyboard, act) within the phases of project-based learning, improves students' spatial thinking and geography skills more than direct instruction. A quasi-experimental nonequivalent control group design involved 72 Grade XI students (36 per class) at a public high school in Malang, a flood-prone city in East Java, Indonesia. Experimental groups investigated flooding in assigned neighborhoods through fieldwork, conversations with affected residents, and web-based hazard maps, whereas the control class received direct instruction. Spatial thinking was measured with pre- and post-test essays covering concepts of space, tools of representation, and reasoning processes, and five geographic inquiry skills were observed during learning. Normalized gains were compared with the Mann-Whitney U test and skill scores with an independent-samples t-test. The experimental class achieved significantly greater spatial thinking gains across all three components (U = 386.0, p = .003, r = .35) and higher geography skills (t(70) = 22.03, p < .001), with 78% highly skilled versus none in the control class. Anchoring inquiry in students' own flood-affected places can strengthen spatial reasoning and inquiry skills, although the single-school design and instructor-rated observations limit generalization. For geography education, this implies that local hazard landscapes can serve as sites of place-based inquiry beyond the classroom.]]>
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